Cars and the people they drive

On intelligent cars and the people they drive

"Lindi says her car had an accident," my spouse told me, with the straightest face she could muster. "Yeah, right," said I, "people have nothing to do with cars getting bent, do they?" On reflection, however, maybe Lindi has a point...

Most of today's cars have ABS, which means you don't need to know about cadence braking on wet roads, let alone apply it in practice. Further, many cars have, and if the Eurocrats got their way it would be compulsory, Electronic Stability Control (ESC). This realises before you do that you are driving into a corner 'way too fast or correcting an error much too vigorously, and applies independent braking forces in just the right amounts to each wheel individually in order to rescue you from yourself.

Add to this, alarms that tell you when you are getting too close to solid objects in front and behind, so you don't need to know where the extremities of your vehicle are. A few manufacturers have models with little cameras all around, so that drivers can actually see what's happening at ground level, just in case common sense and audible warnings aren't enough.

And if you can’t be bothered to look over your shoulder before changing lanes, a gadget on the rear view mirror will warn you if it’s not a good idea. But possibly more useful are cameras at either ends of both front and back bumpers to warn you that the vehicle you can’t see yet, and approaching from the side as you ease out of that parking bay, is about to impale you side-on. There are more cameras: Such as the one, coupled to your satnav, that reads international-spec road signs to remind you that you are now in a new speed limit zone and should back off.

Then there's the Volvo invention that reads the body language of the pedestrian on the sidewalk ahead and begins evasive manoeuvres a split second before he or she steps blindly out into your path. Or detects the first wobble of the cyclist up front before he wanders like a zombie and becomes an ugly and unwanted hood ornament - unless the bonnet lifter deploys in time to toss him back over the roof of your car to become someone else's problem.

As if the old favourite automatic speed control wasn't enough, most manufacturers now offer Active Cruise Control which detects when you are about to steam up the exhaust pipe of the car ahead and sounds a gentle warning. If you are too wrapped up in thoughts of your next hostile take over, the system will actually slow your car a bit in order to maintain a safer following distance. For those too brain dead to realise that the car ahead has stopped, your Minder-program will jump on the anchors for you.

Following on from that, Google and Volvo amongst others are experimenting with taking the concept one step further so that you simply tag onto a platoon of vehicles all going the same way. A lead driver will do the actual work of driving while you and a hundred others get on with office work, using the built-in WiFi, while your phalanx of idiocy plunges on to oblivion at a preset 80 kilometres per hour. I read some readers’ reactions to an article on that subject just recently. Almost half the reactions were in favour. Lord save us from sheep!

How about the Heads Up Display, the system that projects the car's instruments up onto the windscreen or somewhere halfway along the bonnet, so you theoretically don't have to take your attention off the road ahead for even a nanosecond? That is a good way of mesmerising you totally, so you no longer process the information unfolding before your now-unseeing eyes - until the Lane Wander Warning frightens you awake again.

Frighten you awake? Been done already. Modern wonder-mobiles analyse your driving rhythms and decide when you are being erratic, so they can flash up an icon of a steaming coffee cup to suggest that you pull over to rest. That is followed, in extreme cases, by a buzzer. If you are truly stubborn, the car just switches off and coasts itself to a stop; over a cliff perhaps.

Active Steering - now that sounds good. The car steers itself, right? Not quite. It's a rehash of Preston Tucker's invention of the 1930s, in which a third centrally-mounted headlight pointed the way the steering wheel was being aimed, so drivers could get a better view of what was happening around the next curve. Modern variants use fog lamps, or LEDs that light up sequentially as you get deeper into the corner, to illuminate the edge of the road; same idea, more expensive execution.

Going beyond that, Mercedes-Benz and a couple of others provide nighttime radar that looks beyond the range of your lights to detect pedestrians and large animals. No-one wants to centre punch a drunk pedestrian who is too dim to see you coming with your beams on highly bright, so that is potentially useful. And big animals can cause big damage or even hospitalisation of the people inside the car, so I would go for that too.

While on the subject of lighting, how about Adaptive Lights that get brighter as you drive faster, or the self-dipping variety that do what your common sense used to tell you to do - namely to avoid blinding oncoming drivers with your super-powered Xenon- or LED Daylighters?

Another lighting gem for the cerebrally challenged is the gadget that decides for you when it would be a good idea to turn the lights on in the first place. Don't worry, Mum, it's pretty much fail-safe - any overcast day will trigger the device, so your self-absorbed offspring won't be driving at dusk without the benefit of lights.

Also in the self-switching department is a device that tells your car that rain is falling and turns on the wipers for you. Funny, those of us who grew up in the days of actually being able to drive were able to notice precipitation all by ourselves and take the necessary steps.

What about self-parking cars for those precious individuals who got themselves “heavy duty” driving licences, so that they didn’t have to bother with learning how to parallel park? It’s not just a South African phenomenon; it appears that up to 40-percent of British drivers are also scared witless by thoughts of parking side-on to the kerb. Anyway, that particular gadget is now standard or optional on a whole bunch of cars. There are even versions for drivers who simply cannot reverse park at right angles to the pavement either. Funny; it used to be part of the curriculum.

For those who are truly lazy, modern Mercedes-Benzes, among others, have clever dampers (shock absorbers) that detect when you are driving "dynamically" (getting a hustle on) and adjust damper settings, steering response and gearbox characteristics accordingly. Just imagine, you don't even have to select "Sport" mode for yourself - the car does it for you. When you switch off the brain again and drive more gently, the car reverts to cruiser mode as well.

As if that isn’t enough, new electronic devices “read” the road ahead and pre-adjust the suspension a microsecond before you get there. And how about combining satnav with radar to study the way ahead so your car knows where you are about to go and prepares itself for the oncoming bend? Been done already. Sorry I can no longer surprise you.

Let's not forget regular Global Positioning via Satellite (GPS), which tells you (hopefully) when to turn left and right and when you have arrived. All we need now is a gadget that twiddles the steering wheel for you and turns the ignition key on and off. Forgot: Only the first one is still necessary. The key stays in one's pocket, so one simply needs to push the big "Start/Stop" button, nowadays. Makes me wonder why there aren't robot chauffeurs about, because driving is obviously such an inconvenience for most vehicle owners that it has been automated out of existence.

To sum up - people no longer need common sense, skill or active brain cells in order to move their bodies from A to B in modern transportation modules, because cars do all the necessary thinking on their "drivers'" behalf. So why do we still have driver training, tests and licences anyway?

I guess Lindi was right - her car's electronics weren't quite smart enough to repeal the laws of physics so it did have an accident...